Film Freak Centraltag:typepad.com,2003:weblog-999282957331064452015-02-13T20:06:02-05:00TypePadFifty Shades of Grey (2015)tag:typepad.com,2003:post-6a0168ea36d6b2970c01b8d0d627c7970c2015-02-13T20:06:02-05:002015-02-13T20:09:12-05:00**/**** starring Dakota Johnson, Jamie Dornan, Aaron Taylor-Johnson, Jennifer Ehle screenplay by Kelly Marcel, based on the novel by E.L. James directed by Sam Taylor-Johnson by Walter Chaw In an age of post-satire, where Sarah Palin has a cognitive episode on every channel and prints the take, where it's actually become impossible to mock something that's constantly in the process of taking itself down, enter E. L. James's radioactively-popular "Fifty Shades of Grey" trilogy, which creeps under the low bar set by key inspiration Stephenie Meyer. It all sets the stage of course for Idiocracy's most popular movie in the land being a continuous loop of an ass, sometimes farting. That's what makes the first hour of Sam Taylor-Johnson's film adaptation of Fifty Shades of Grey actually something like a revelation. She, along with screenwriter Kelly Marcel, has somehow managed to turn the excrescent source material--excrescent not for its eroticism (I like me a good Henry Miller any day of the week), but for its illiteracy--into a satire of that section in the used bookstore where you can buy a grocery-bagful for a $1.00, trade-ins welcome. The picture does the impossible: It makes fun of something so stupid and anti-lovely...Bill ChambersThe Night Porter (1974) [The Criterion Collection] - Blu-ray Disctag:typepad.com,2003:post-6a0168ea36d6b2970c01b7c740d11a970b2015-01-28T20:23:48-05:002015-01-28T20:24:07-05:00click any image to enlarge **½/**** Image A Sound A Extras B starring Dirk Bogarde, Charlotte Rampling, Philippe Leroy, Gabriele Ferzetti screenplay by Liliana Cavani and Italo Moscati directed by Liliana Cavani by Bryant Frazer The Night Porter is one of the most bizarre psychodramas in the history of film, using the Holocaust as a dreamy, abstract backdrop for a toxic romance between a former SS officer (Dirk Bogarde) and the "little girl" (Charlotte Rampling) he isolated, humiliated, and raped in a Nazi concentration camp. If that sounds absolutely outrageous, that was surely part of the design. This wasn't Ilsa: She Wolf of the SS or another in the short-lived cycle of Nazi-themed exploitation pictures. This was Italian director Liliana Cavani's first English-language feature, and Bogarde and Rampling were English-language stars. In order to recoup, The Night Porter would need to be provocative. Cavani delivered on that score. European critics are said to have taken the movie's sociopolitical context seriously, but upon arrival in New York its outré imagery generated a mix of critical scorn and mockery that, ironically, helped earn it big returns at the box office. (Vincent Canby's pan deriding it as "romantic pornography" was highlighted in the...Bill ChambersSuccubus (1968) - DVDtag:typepad.com,2003:post-6a0168ea36d6b2970c01bb07a1e953970d2014-10-29T13:31:30-05:002014-10-29T13:31:30-05:00Necronomicon - Geträumte Sünden **/**** Image C+ Sound B- Extras B- starring Janine Reynaud, Jack Taylor, Howard Vernon, Adrian Hoven screenplay by Pier A. Caminnecci directed by Jess Franco by Alex Jackson Jess Franco's Succubus begins with heroine Lorna (Janine Reynaud) torturing and molesting a man chained to a stake while his similarly bound, bloodied, and partially-nude lover watches. The lover protests, so Lorna tortures her some until she passes out. She then goes to the man and plays with him a bit before skewering him with her ceremonial knife. The lights fade up and an audience applauds. The snuff scene was simulated. It's part of an act Lorna performs at a chic nightclub. This opening is the most eloquent and lucid scene in the film, for it establishes that director Jess Franco no longer has a responsibility to be eloquent and lucid. Succubus is going to be told subjectively through the perspective or Lorna, who is going schizophrenic (or something) and is increasingly unable to distinguish between reality and fantasy. Thus, whatever we see might actually be happening--and then again it might not be. We never really know. RUNNING TIME 79 minutes MPAA Not Rated ASPECT RATIO(S) 1.66:1 (16x9-enhanced)...Bill ChambersVenus in Fur (2013)tag:typepad.com,2003:post-6a0168ea36d6b2970c01a73def06e2970d2014-07-17T14:00:35-05:002014-07-17T14:03:13-05:00La Vénus à la fourrure ***½/**** starring Emmanuelle Seigner, Mathieu Amalric screenplay by David Ives, based on his play directed by Roman Polanski by Walter Chaw If it's stagebound, Roman Polanski's Venus in Fur, an adaptation of David Ives's play that is itself an adaptation in part of the Leopold von Sacher-Masoch novel, is at least not stagebound without a purpose. It reminds of Adaptation. in its awareness of itself as an object open to deconstruction (and Derrida is mentioned in the text to make it metacritical in that sense as well); the fact that it's a play captured on film only underscores its conceit. Venus in Fur is also a career summary for the octogenarian director at a point where his contemporaries are declining steeply in their dotage. Spry and clever, surprisingly funny at times, and at all times indisputably alive, it finds Polanski's themes of gender subversion in high dunder, opening with a quote from the Apocryphal Book of Judith where the titular heroine seduces enemy general Holofrenes and decapitates (read: emasculates/castrates) him as he reclines in post-coital bliss. Polanski casts an actor who could be his younger doppelgänger, Mathieu Amalric, and opposite him in this two-person drama...Bill ChambersThe Dreamers (2004); Rhinoceros Eyes (2003); Stealing Beauty (1996) - DVD|The Dreamers (2004) [Original Uncut NC-17 Version] - DVDtag:typepad.com,2003:post-6a0168ea36d6b2970c01a73de0d4dc970d2014-06-26T23:01:00-05:002014-06-26T11:51:37-05:00THE DREAMERS **½/**** Image A Sound A- Extras A starring Michael Pitt, Louis Garrel, Eva Green, Robin Renucci screenplay by Gilbert Adair directed by Bernardo Bertolucci RHINOCEROS EYES ***½/**** starring Michael Pitt, Paige Turco, Gale Harold, Matt Servitto written and directed by Aaron Woodley by Walter Chaw The danger is getting lost in fantasy, of being consumed by the lunar flame of lamplight filtered through celluloid. And the irony is that directors, the good ones, are already lost and have been for years. There have been pictures about an all-devouring cinephilia before (Cinema Paradiso, say, or 8½), and now a pair of films by two directors at opposite ends of their careers--Bernardo Bertolucci's The Dreamers and Aaron Woodley's 2003 TIFF Discovery Award-winner Rhinoceros Eyes--strive to blur the line between movies and reality in twin tales of sexual maturation, of coming of age in a movie house--of, to parse The Judybats, learning how to kiss watching James Dean movies. Fascinatingly, the two films share Michael Pitt, forging a path for himself as the archon for the modern dreamer raised on lethal doses of popular culture, and weaning himself from that luxuriant udder only with great difficulty. RUNNING TIME 113 minutes MPAA...Bill ChambersCat People (1982) [Collector's Edition] - Blu-ray Disctag:typepad.com,2003:post-6a0168ea36d6b2970c01a3fce55ab5970b2014-04-02T20:56:06-05:002014-04-03T09:32:22-05:00click any image to enlarge ***/**** Image B Sound B+ Extras B- starring Nastassia Kinski, Malcolm McDowell, John Heard, Annette O'Toole screenplay by Alan Ormsby, based on the story by DeWitt Bodeen directed by Paul Schrader by Bryant Frazer Amid the American horror boom of the late-1970s and early-1980s, when everything old was new again and once-dormant studio properties like Invasion of the Body Snatchers, The Thing from Another World, and The Fly were suddenly valuable franchises, the script for a remake of Cat People, one of the most subtle of all horror classics, somehow ended up on Paul Schrader's desk. Why Schrader? Dumb luck, mostly. Certainly he had no great love for the source material, a 1942 horror film directed by Jacques Tourneur that Schrader famously (and charmlessly) claimed "isn't that brilliant." But he must have seen in the raw material the opportunity to make a deeply weird movie, one that fused a new mythology with a contemporary melodrama of fear, desire, and violence. The result is not just a personal expression of Schrader's own sex-and-death preoccupations, but a sort of high-water mark for the quixotic attempt to meld visually sophisticated erotica with commercially savvy narrative storytelling. RUNNING TIME...Bill ChambersNymph()maniac (2013)tag:typepad.com,2003:post-6a0168ea36d6b2970c01a73d9654a3970d2014-03-21T13:57:29-05:002014-03-21T14:09:45-05:00Nymph()maniac: Vol. I Nymph()maniac: Vol. II ***½/**** starring Charlotte Gainsbourg, Stellan Skarsgård, Stacy Martin, Shia LaBeouf written and directed by Lars von Trier by Angelo Muredda Partway through the second volume of Lars von Trier's surprisingly nimble Nymph()maniac, wounded storyteller Joe (three-time Trier MVP Charlotte Gainsbourg) tells her rapt listener Seligman (Stellan Skarsgård) about the time she went to a support group for her sex addiction. When the group's straight-edge policy proved more than she could bear, Joe bowed out, but not before quipping that her fellow sufferers are nothing but "society's morality police, whose duty is to erase my obscenity from the surface of the earth so that the bourgeoisie won't feel sick." At last, one thinks, von Trier has found his ideal authorial surrogate in Gainsbourg, whose weird Brechtian delivery is halfway between earnest declaration and stiff high-school rendition of The Crucible. Von Trier has been a professional troll, masking his underlying seriousness with outré gestures, since long before he started sporting T-shirts emblazoned with "PERSONA NON GRATA," in tribute to Cannes' goofy decision to brand him uncouth for joking that his Wagner fixation owed to a latent penchant for Nazism. (All joshing aside, it obviously stung him.)...Bill ChambersSexual Predator (2001) - DVDtag:typepad.com,2003:post-6a0168ea36d6b2970c01a51189b704970c2014-03-20T23:01:00-05:002014-03-19T18:46:42-05:00ZERO STARS/**** Image C- Sound C+ starring Angie Everhart, Richard Grieco, Kevin Fry, Elizabeth Barondes screenplay by Ed Silverstein directed by Robert Angelo by Walter Chaw SPOILER WARNING IN EFFECT. Lacking the camp quality of Zandalee and the sleazy titillation of Wild Orchid, Robert Angelo's neo-Zalman King/soft-porn/direct-to-video abomination Sexual Predator (a.k.a. Last Cry) is full of Richard Grieco moments like the one where he fondles straight razors, huskily droning, "This, this is my favourite," as well as Angie Everhart showcasing her newfound, Mamie Van Doren-esque compulsion to get naked. It is a purported psychosexual thriller that establishes Grieco as the new Mickey Rourke and Everhart as the new Shannon Tweed while simultaneously verifying that both actors have given up. RUNNING TIME 95 minutes MPAA Unrated ASPECT RATIO(S) 1.33:1 LANGUAGES English Dolby Surround French DD 2.0 (Mono) CC Yes SUBTITLES English French Spanish Portuguese Chinese Korean Thai REGION 1 DISC TYPE DVD-5 STUDIO Columbia TriStar Beth (Everhart) is a probation officer assigned the case of the man, J.C. Gale (Grieco), who murdered her best friend during an asphyxiation sex game. The launching pad for a bathetic "exploration" of sex and how "society" has made it unnatural, Sexual Predator reaches all-time lows...Bill ChambersStranger by the Lake (2013)tag:typepad.com,2003:post-6a0168ea36d6b2970c01a3fc53cf14970b2014-01-17T12:42:01-05:002014-01-17T12:47:38-05:00L'inconnu du lac ***½/**** starring Pierre Deladonchamps, Christophe Paou, Patrick d'Assumçao, Jérôme Chappatte written and directed by Alain Guiraudie by Angelo Muredda Late in Alain Guiraudie's Stranger by the Lake, a detective sent to investigate the murder of a young man at a nude male beach designated as a gay cruising spot breaks from his procedural script to unload his exasperation on a potential suspect. "You guys have a strange way of loving each other sometimes," the investigator (Jérôme Chappatte) points out, when it seems that no one can provide him with so much as the first names of their recent conquests, much less recall the moment the handsome guy with the ballcap vanished without a trace, save for his abandoned beach towel. His assessment cuts two ways in a film that, before veering into the territory of gothic sex thrillers with uncommon ease, takes a wry anthropological approach to good sex and bad love in a space designed to indulge both in their most rarefied forms. On the one hand, the detective is an anticipatory mouthpiece for the conservative critics who would rain down on the movie he's in, eager perhaps to brand this tribe he's wandered into as...Bill ChambersSDFF '13: The Broken Circle Breakdowntag:typepad.com,2003:post-6a0168ea36d6b2970c019b00ca95fa970c2013-11-07T21:03:05-05:002013-11-16T20:51:58-05:00***/**** starring Johan Heldenbergh, Veerle Baetens, Nell Cattrysse, Geert Van Rampelberg screenplay by Carl Joos & Felix Van Groeningen, based on the play by Johan Heldenbergh & Mieke Dobbels directed by Felix Van Groeningen by Walter Chaw Felix Van Groeningen's The Broken Circle Breakdown eventually loses impetus and becomes political theatre, but until it does it's exceptional melodrama, raw and emotional. It walks the fine line for a while, staying just this side of exploitation in its alinear tale of a little girl who gets cancer and her parents--how they met, the aftermath, and then the far aftermath. The film's central event, then, isn't the child's fate, but rather the meet-cute of the parents, with squarish Didier (Johan Heldenbergh) asking about Elise's (Veerle Baetens) tattoos in the parlour where she works. A bit shocked, and maybe titillated, that each has a story of a different man attached to it, he invites her to, essentially, come see him perform with his bluegrass band in a tiny club down the way. Van Groeningen, working from an original idea and stage play by Heldenbergh, adroitly alternates the events of the film with Didier's band's songs; in other words, The Broken Circle Breakdown owes...Bill ChambersOn the Road (2012) - Blu-ray Disctag:typepad.com,2003:post-6a0168ea36d6b2970c017c35f00870970b2013-08-12T20:22:56-05:002013-08-12T20:22:56-05:00*½/**** Image C+ Sound A- Extras D+ starring Sam Riley, Garrett Hedlund, Kristen Stewart, Viggo Mortensen screenplay by Jose Rivera, based on the novel by Jack Kerouac directed by Walter Salles click any image to enlarge by Angelo Muredda "You goin' some place, or just goin'?" a fellow traveller asks Sam Riley's Sal Paradise in the long-gestating, still-undigested On the Road, Walter Salles's handsomely-mounted but stiff adaptation of Jack Kerouac's hipster Bible. While that's a dangerous line to adapt in such an aimless movie, it isn't even the most unfortunate moment of meta-commentary within the first ten minutes. Consider Sal's panicked voiceover about the text he's spinning out, ostensibly the same one we're trudging through: "And what is there to talk about exactly? The book I'm not writing? The inspiration I don't feel? Even the beer's flat." What, indeed? What's left to say about a project that insists on reviewing itself at regular checkpoints and keeps finding its inspiration wanting? RUNNING TIME 124 minutes MPAA R ASPECT RATIO(S) 2.40:1 (1080p/MPEG-4) LANGUAGES English 5.1 DTS-HD MA English 2.0 LPCM (Stereo) SUBTITLES English SDH Spanish REGION A DISC TYPE BD-25 STUDIO Sundance The beer certainly is flat, but credit Salles and production...Bill ChambersLifeforce (1985) [Collector's Edition] - Blu-ray + DVD Combo Packtag:typepad.com,2003:post-6a0168ea36d6b2970c01901e6004a1970b2013-07-22T11:09:15-05:002013-07-22T12:00:33-05:00**/****Image B+ Sound B+ Extras B starring Steve Railsback, Peter Firth, Frank Finlay, Mathilda May screenplay by Dan O'Bannon & Don Jakoby, based on the novel The Space Vampires by Colin Wilson directed by Tobe Hooper click any image to enlarge by Bryant Frazer The early 1980s must have been a weird time to be Tobe Hooper. The Texas Chain Saw Massacre had made him one of the most notorious directors in the world, and Poltergeist vaulted him onto the A-list. He would have been on top of the world if not for an extended controversy over that film: Poltergeist was produced by Steven Spielberg, and there were widespread rumours that he actually directed it, too. Hooper denied it and Spielberg issued oddly-worded statements that permanently muddied the waters. Whatever the truth of their collaboration, the controversy was a blow to Hooper's reputation. His Texas Chain Saw felt almost like outsider art--raw and twisted, it was the antithesis of the burnished Spielberg style. Poltergeist, on the other hand, was the very quintessence of a Steven Spielberg film, from its familiar suburban family in distress to its richly-detailed mise en scène‎. If Hooper really did direct it, it doesn't say much...Bill ChambersMy Mother (2004) + Exiles (2004)tag:typepad.com,2003:post-6a0168ea36d6b2970c01901e442510970b2013-07-14T23:01:00-05:002013-07-14T20:34:22-05:00Ma mère *½/**** starring Isabelle Huppert, Louis Garrel, Emma de Caunes, Joana Preis screenplay by Christopher Honoré, based on the novel by Georges Bataille directed by Christopher Honoré Exils ***/**** starring Romain Duris, Lubna Azabal, Leila Makhlouf, Habib Cheik written and directed by Tony Gatlif by Bill Chambers Even after the Hays Office lost its stranglehold on the screen trade, mainstream American erotica remained a largely intellectual affair. Rather than try to get you off, films like Paul Mazursky's Bob and Carol and Ted and Alice and Mike Nichols's Carnal Knowledge were interested in examining the fallout from sex. Meanwhile, France was cranking out Sylvia Kristel movies, and the raincoat crowd could enjoy even such highbrow fare as Last Tango in Paris for long stretches. If the legit French sex cinema ultimately bore a closer resemblance to red-blooded American filth in the '70s (and not just ethically: the 'X aesthetic' was like dumbed-down nouvelle vague), it makes sense that it would chart a course parallel with stateside porno's gradual descent into the penetration abyss. But while the (d)evolution itself is an organic one born of desensitization, things have progressed along a more self-conscious path in recent years, with the incendiary...Bill ChambersTristana (1970) - Blu-ray Disctag:typepad.com,2003:post-6a0168ea36d6b2970c017d430e7c6b970c2013-04-24T01:03:14-05:002013-04-24T12:19:02-05:00***/**** Image A- Sound B+ Extras B+ starring Catherine Deneuve, Fernando Rey, Franco Nero, Lola Gaos screenplay by Luis Buñuel in collaboration with Julio Alejandro, based on the novel by Benito Pérez Galdós directed by Luis Buñuel by Angelo Muredda You might not think it from overdetermined schlock like Simon Birch, but disability is a tough trope to wrangle, an errant bodily signifier that doesn't always play nice. Just think of Million Dollar Baby, which tries and fails to use Hilary Swank's impairment as a narrative shortcut for Clint Eastwood's transformation into a tender father, troubled Catholic, and euthanizer-turned-agent of transcendence all at once. Eastwood the director has to stumble over the mechanics of his scene partner's newly-maimed body and horizontal status, fudging the timeline so that her bedsores appear to sprout within minutes of her injury and puzzling over how to frame her, whether as a head poking out of a hospital bed in the background or a wheelchair-sporting cyborg parked in dead centre, staring out her hospital window like a forlorn puppy. That representational awkwardness is so common that in disability studies, it even has a name: Ato Quayson calls it "aesthetic nervousness," meaning a text's tendency to...Bill ChambersIn Treatment [Season One] (2008) + Tell Me You Love Me: The Complete First Season (2007) - DVDstag:typepad.com,2003:post-6a0168ea36d6b2970c017c37ff5d97970b2013-03-21T21:08:31-05:002013-03-21T21:08:31-05:00Image B Sound B Extras B ("Tell Me You Love Me") by Walter Chaw It's a show about the traditional mode of psychoanalysis--a nine-week, five days-a-week series detailing shrink Paul (Gabriel Byrne) and four patients, culminating each "Friday" in Paul's own session with former mentor Gina (Dianne Wiest). It's based on a popular Israeli drama that was the brainchild of such filmmaking talents as Eran Kolarin and Nir Bergman. And though it begins stilted and ends badly, its thick mid-section is the enabler of our obsessive, maybe ugly, voyeuristic impulses, gratifying the viewer with the sensation that, for all the dense verbal webs spun in these little progressive one-acts, the real expert is the viewer. "In Treatment" clarifies the role of the observer in this media, how the active participant is always involved in an anthropological exercise deconstructing the characters' motives and actions--and how that critical facility, eternally underused, is occasionally gratified by material that's not quite smarter than you, but appears to be. RUNNING TIME 30 minutes/episode MPAA Not Rated ASPECT RATIO(S) 1.78:1 (16x9-enhanced) LANGUAGES English DD 5.1 Spanish DD 2.0 (Stereo) CC Yes SUBTITLES English French Spanish REGION 1 DISC TYPE 9 DVD-9s STUDIO HBO RUNNING TIME 45...Bill Chambers